I recently accompanied my wife as she traveled to Minnesota for her 50th high school reunion. It’s not easy being a reunion “spouse” while a group of 68-year-olds reexamine their senior year neuroses.
Being a reunion spouse is a lot like being nobody.
I opted out of a lunch gathering, and with an afternoon to myself decided to throw my caution to the wind and head out to The Mall of America. This four-million sq. ft mega-mall covers nearly 100 acres, and includes well over 400 retail shops. A large hotel has been built right next door for mall tourists. A short hop from the Minneapolis airport, Mall of America enjoys over 40 million visitors each year, and now I am one of them.
Let it be known I am a reluctant consumer. I generally don’t like shopping, find myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices, am impatient with pawing through poorly organized badly labeled racks, and would rather read a book about quantum physics. Despite all this, I’ve vowed not to avoid life’s unpleasant moments, and rather to lean into my discomfort. Thus to the mega-mall I gamely trekked.
Well, no surprise; upon entering I saw all things familiar, the chain stores and franchises that dot America from coast to coast. In fact, that’s all I saw, a vast temple of consumerism filled with eager flocks of initiates, wandering glassy-eyed through endless corridors lined with stuff. Within minutes, I too was glassy-eyed, my senses overloaded, my gait slowed to a shuffle not unlike that of an elderly dementia patient tanked on heavy sedatives. The public corridors were my only place of refuge, the Bardo between hell-realm retailers confronting me on either side.
The idea of actually entering a shop was frightening, like the fear of being bound, gagged, kidnapped and waking up on an ugly planet inhabited only by salesmen.
Just when I thought I might have to wander those endless halls for eternity, I spied a crack of bright light sneaking around a corner; it drew me to it like a moth to flame. I heard high-pitched screams and wild cater-wailing, and rounding the bend saw a vast skylight-covered open space five or six stories high, filled with an assemblage of roller-coasters and twirling rides, a riotous, high-tech nausea-inducing amusement park in garish colors.
To add to the frenzy, this vast atrium was surrounded by fast food vendors, peddling a panoply of nuggets, fries, burgers, sausages, pizza, bread sticks, jumbo sodas, onion rings, corn dogs, cotton candy, and ice cream. I began to feel like Dante, confronting the nine circles of hell, humanity reduced to gluttony, excitement and accumulation. It was then I realized I was lost, that I did not remember where I’d walked or how to get out. Everything began to close in on me as I felt my heart pounding loudly in my head.
Then in a flash it suddenly came to me…I understood it all. I needed to give in, give up, surrender! I dashed into a shop and grabbed a yellow Sponge-Bob Squarepants T-Shirt for my granddaughter Isabelle, size four, $11.95. A great wave of relief washed over me. My breathing slowed. “How do I get out?” I asked the perky sales-girl. She grinned and simply pointed to the right. Five minutes later I was outside.
This is my tale and I, perhaps alone, have survived to tell ye of it.
